@ Artists' Television Access

Jennifer Reeves’ When It Was Blue

“Drawing as much from the feminist surrealism of Peggy Ahwesh, the interior psychological exploration of Stan Brakhage, and the globalized interiority of Warren Sonbert as from the Vertovian heritage, Jennifer Reeves turns the screen into a materialist writing-pad that moves at the speed of private thought.” (Michael Sicinski)

Presented by Cinematheque as a work-in-progress in 2008, Jennifer Reeves‘ now-completed When It Was Blue is a work of incredible ambition and scope. Described by Chris Stults as “an overwhelmingly powerful achievement on a truly epic scale,” the dual-projected, feature-length, 16mm work is a dazzling, deliriously immersive and visceral sound/image experience. Shot over three years in Iceland, New Zealand, Costa Rica and North America, in documentation of our fragile natural world, the film—fiercely overpainted, spectacularly edited—explodes with color and an overpowering sense of nowness, a rushed sense of urgency. In its attempt at maximal expression and globalizing vision, in its fusion of simultaneously micro- and macroscopic views of nature with a blurred sense of subjective visuality and interiority, When It Was Blue is a filmic achievement on par with the most ambitious works of Stan Brakhage, Jack Chambers and Michele Smith, an ecstatic work of complex visual philosophy which aspires (tragically) to nothing less than the reconciliation of objective and subjective realities. Other short works by Reeves will screen. (Steve Polta)